# Research Engineer, Midtraining at Periodic Labs

- Company: Periodic Labs
- What the company does: From bits to atoms. Backed by Accel, Lightspeed and a16z.
- Company website: https://periodic.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: Menlo Park, CA
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $250K to $350K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-08-11
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-labs/d3be5ecc-c4d3-4c9e-9a4d-519ab6147474
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/periodic-labs-research-engineer-midtraining/

## About the role

We're training frontier models to develop deep scientific knowledge and reasoning for scientific discovery. As a Midtraining Research Engineer, you'll take base models and improve their scientific reasoning: curating and generating data, building evals, and running large-scale training experiments. Your work will also lay the groundwork for our pre-training efforts down the line. Identify, process, and curate novel sources of scientific data for large-scale model training.

## What they're looking for

- Experience training LLMs on curated mixes of trillions of tokens
- Experience on a dedicated evals team supporting a large production training run
- Hands-on use of self-distillation, on-policy distillation, or similar methods in a real training pipeline
- Experience with scaling laws and compute-optimal hyperparameters
- Comfort working across data, evals, and training infrastructure

Tags: Engineering